Feed Your Gut Microbes, Or They Might Eat You Instead

This one’s going in our “Wildcard” category, and it is indeed pretty wild.

Or at least it seems so from first impressions, but as you’ll see, it actually is very reasonable (even if being consumed from the inside doesn’t feel reasonable)!

Remember, you are made of food

Inside your gut are your trillions of tiny friends who keep you alive. They do a wide assortment of tasks for you, and here’s a good introduction to that if you’re unfamiliar: Making Friends With Your Gut (You Can Thank Us Later)

We’ve also written about what can go wrong when they’re not kept well: Stop Sabotaging Your Gut

Now here’s another surprising reason why keeping your gut microbiota healthy is important: if you don’t, they might eat you instead!

Specifically, when dietary fiber (the main food upon which most of your gut microbiota feed) is scarce, they can turn their attention instead to eating the proteins (remember, you are made of food) from the lining that protects the intestine, as an alternative food source.

The reason why they’re able to make the jump from fiber-eating to protein-eating is, counterintuitively, because of the fiber that they’re accustomed to eating. Indigestible plant proteins, also known as “proteins imitating fiber” (Prif) in this context, if made available to such microbes, shift the metabolism of those microbes toward producing more beneficial phenols

You can read about how this happens, here: Digestion-resistant proteins support the healthy metabolite profiles associated with plant-based diets

A quick note on harmful versus beneficial phenols: in another recent study also by the same Dr. Jenna AbuSalim et al. as the study we just mentioned, microbial processing of host proteins, including mucus proteins, produced compounds such as p-cresol sulfate and phenol sulfate (these are not good things to have an excess of in your gut). Processing indigestible plant proteins instead favored phenylpropionate and hippuric acid (very healthful things to have in one’s gut, unless taken truly to extremes):

❝We demonstrate that circulating levels of these metabolites in mice and human patients are robust to perturbations of the microbiome. By contrast, bacterial metabolism is required to synthesize aryl-propionates and free indole, phenol and p-cresol. Overall, these results suggest that host metabolism is a major contributor to circulating indole and phenol metabolite pools.❞

This is big news, as while the first study really gave us mostly bad news (feed your gut bacteria or they may eat you instead), this one highlights unexpected* benefits of enjoying plenty of plant fiber in our diet.

You can read about that in full, here: Host metabolism can produce many indoles and phenols independently of the microbiome

*Unexpected, that is, in the sense of being in addition to the already well-established benefits of getting plenty of fiber, such as we have discussed in Why You’re Probably Not Getting Enough Fiber (And How To Fix It), and also the more specific benefits we talked about in Gut Health 2.0!

It also gives us a new perspective on topics such as: The Surprising Food Compound That Fixes Leaky Gut 😎

Want to learn more?

For a wide-array of very tasty high-fiber approaches to food, you might want to check out this book we reviewed:

The Fiber Fueled Cookbook – by Dr. Will Bulsiewicz

…which is the cookbook addition to the same author’s previous work, Fiber Fueled – by Dr. Will Bulsiewicz

Enjoy!